Page 11 - The Unofficial Guide to Lego Mindstorms Robots
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I'd like to thank my parents for buying me LEGO sets when I was a kid. Did you ever expect something like this?
Many thanks go to my wife, Kristen, for helping to create this book. She first suggested its project-oriented organization; she gave me
excellent feedback on many of its chapters; she got me RolyKits to help organize my pieces; she is able to keep a straight face when we tell
people I'm writing a book about LEGO robots; she stayed up late nights helping me finish the book.
I'm grateful to my daughter, Daphne, who finally believes that building LEGO robots is part of my job. ''Want to see Daddy," she said one
day. Kristen explained, "No, no, sweetheart, Daddy's working right now." With tears in her eyes, Daphne said, "Daddy's not working. Daddy
play LEGOs." Someday, I promise, I'll let Daphne play with the whole set, not just the bendy purple things. And thanks to my sons, Luke
and Andrew, just for being great guys. You can build robots someday too, if you wish.
The building instructions in this book were a special challenge. I first sketched out the building instructions with photos from a digital
camera. Once these were finished, Kristen took over 475 photographs with a regular camera. We selected the best and sent them off to the
O'Reilly illustration department. These photographs were scanned in and meticulously touched up, cropped, edited, and manipulated to
produce the instructions that you see in the book. I owe many thanks to Rob Romano for his hard work on these instructions.
This book has had an excellent set of technical reviewers. Ralph Hempel, Todd Lehman, Russel Nelson, Suzanne Rich, John Tamplin,
ActivMedia Robotics ( http://www.activrobots.com/ ), and Ben Williamson provided insightful and authoritative feedback on a draft of this
book. Thanks also to Stephan Somogyi for encouraging me to include more information about using a Macintosh with MINDSTORMS.